The Fly Fisher's Reader

Anglers will jump at Wright's ( First Cast ) bait: 27 stories, articles and excerpts from books published over the last century, all about fishing. Sports columnist Red Smith describes Rocky Weinstein, an intrepid Everglades fisherman who ``casts for six-foot alligators with a seven-and-a-half-foot fly rod''; Smith has no idea how Weinstein gets the hook out of the alligator. Theodore Gordon, ``father of American dry-fly fishing,'' writes in 1903 of his own difficulty landing a particular three-pound trout (had it eluded him, ``it would have been remembered as that four- or five-pound trout that got away''). Novelist Thomas McGuane, savoring ``the long silences'' of his sport, recounts a delightful episode in which a stingray futilely attempts to hide the crab it has found from a permit (a fish similar to a pompano): the permit nips at the stingray to drive it off the crab while McGuane lies in wait, hoping to catch the permit. (Mar.)